80 Books Every Person Should Read

We invited eight female literary powerhouses, from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to Roxane Gay, to help us create an updated list of books everyone should read.

Jul 26, 2016 12:00am

By BTYB Esquire

What can we say? At Esquire, we messed up. Our list of "80 Books Every Man Should Read," published several years ago, was rightfully called out for its lack of diversity in both authors and titles. So we invited eight female literary powerhouses, from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to Roxane Gay, to help us create a new list. Each participant made 10 picks. We're looking forward to reading and we hope you are, too.

The author's darkly luminous masterpiece: the original novel about the American Dream – and the most beautifully written, ever.

2 / 80

The horrors of slavery are made harrowingly real in a remarkable novel that possesses the intimacy of real life and the epic power of myth.

3 / 80

The master of magical realism conjured the town of Macondo, where the miraculous and the monstrous are equally part of daily life, and in doing so, mythologized the history of an entire continent.

4 / 80

In recounting the story of one woman's death and her burial from multiple points of view, this short, fierce book helped remake the modern novel and influenced generations of writers to come.

5 / 80

The story of one man and one family that is also the story of what happened to America in the second half of the 20th century.

6 / 80

Piercing, prismatic tales about the lives of girls and women that possess the amplitude of novels, and the emotional precision of Chekhov.

7 / 80

A buddy movie starring the British surveyors who mapped the boundary between North and South in pre-Revolutionary America and a dazzling, post-modernist confection that emerges as the author's most affecting novel yet.

8 / 80

A glittering collection of tales animated by the author's fascination with the magical transactions of art and the indelible losses of exile.

9 / 80

A funny, street-smart portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek that unfolds into a vibrant meditation on public and private history.

10 / 80

A children's classic that – back in the 1960’s – gave the world a science fiction heroine: a bright, awkward, spirited girl named Meg Murray who travels through time and space to find her missing scientist father and save the universe.

11 / 80

Ceremony is one of the great (and under-appreciated) American novels. Silko writes with tremendous power, rage, and range of violence, Pueblo myth and a veteran's recovery.

12 / 80

Under the seductive, crisp and funny voice of Grace Paley, there burns a great indignation and condemnation of the way the powerful prey on the weak in society.

13 / 80

This novel has the most capacious vision of humanity. In a crowded field of novels about small towns and marriage and idealism, it remains the best.

14 / 80

In Giovanni's Room, published in 1956, Baldwin writes gorgeously of a homosexual relationship in Paris, a book far ahead of its time.

15 / 80

Autobiography of Red is a deeply affecting book-length poem about Geryon, a demon in love with Herakles. It is also hilarious.

16 / 80

InAnna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote one of the greatest works of synthesis in prose history: this novel pretends to be about a few braided love-stories but it contains more themes, characters, and political ideas than most shelves of books do.

17 / 80

Dickinson's poems are sharp, wild, implosive things. She will always be relentlessly modern, and is one of the parents of modern American poetry.

18 / 80

If Dickinson, with her compression, is one parent of modern American poetry, Whitman is the other parent, working in the expansive, wild, roaming, explosive vein.

19 / 80

This novel has the most stunning architecture, a structure that, the longer one looks at it, the more powerful and moving it becomes. The story is about loss and grief, and is told through the repeated reimagining of a murder the narrator knew of as a boy.

20 / 80

This was one of the first modern novels ever written, and remains one of the funniest and most experimental: there is almost nothing in the most-out there of modern prose that Sterne didn’t do first.

21 / 80

Read this novel to witness the beginnings of New Journalism, or because it's illuminating about human depravity.

22 / 80

Before the Didion craze, there was this. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is where to start with Joan Didion. She is the ultimate cool and keen-eyed observer of the human condition, of America, and of gracefully merciless self-examination.

23 / 80

She's French but she doesn't have to be. She is any reality-challenged newlywed. This first novel is an absolute masterpiece about what happens when humans feel bored and trapped, when they emotionally chew off their own shapely legs.

24 / 80

This collection is about aging and love and marriage and life itself. You will be changed for the better by reading Alice Munro.

25 / 80

Katherine Mansfield is not required reading to be a person – but passion and point of view are – and Mansfield embodies these. She's a bit like a New Zealand Edith Wharton with a sprinkling of Jane Austen and John Cheever. But clever.

26 / 80

The Group is a seminal, massively vital book written ahead of its time and yet very much of its time, focusing on gender politics, friendship, socioeconomic status and influencing whole genres of contemporary fiction – all while being a total blast to read. Every woman should read it to know themselves; every man should read it to know who they’re dealing with.

27 / 80

"People Like That Are Only People Here" is one of the most powerful and important short stories in Moore’s collection, about love and loneliness and motherhood and death, of this century.

28 / 80

The God of Small Things reveals the beauty and grace possible in the darkness like no other novel. This is a novel about having a family, about the motivations within the structure microcosm of society that is a family.

29 / 80

I heard Chimamada Adichie speak about Things Fall Apart several years ago. She said that as a young girls in Nigeria, her books were filled with bouncing Blonde British girls and that she "didn’t know people who looked like me could be in books" until she read Things Fall Apart. Whatever I say about this perfect, archetypical African novel will pale in comparison to that.

30 / 80

What better way to learn how to be a person than to whip one up? Frankenstein's monster is the all-time most enduring image to cross from literature to pop culture and back. And at this gothic artificial heart, he represents a blank slate. Which is depressingly telling about what we choose to latch onto.

31 / 80

Rankine defies genre and writes honestly and relentlessly about being black in modern America. This book is necessary in every sense of the word.

32 / 80

In this novel, Perkins-Valdez writes of life after slavery and the Civil War as a man tries to find his beloved wife, a woman seeks a life for herself away from the mother and aunts who didn’t know how to see her, and a widow who can speak to the dead searches for solace.

33 / 80

NW is an ambitious and audacious novel about four people as they grow up beyond the confines of the council estate where they were raised. It’s thrilling to see how fearless Smith is, taking all kinds of narrative risks throughout while also telling an unforgettable story about identity.

34 / 80

In her debut novel, Catherine Chung writes of a displaced family, a sister harbouring the kind of secret too many girls know too well, and another sister who tries to mend the fractures in her family before it’s too late.

35 / 80

If there is a consummate Los Angeles novel, this would be it, but then as with all her writing, Didion takes things further, to a complex and dark place where a woman’s choices are painfully constrained by the whims of men.

36 / 80

In this moving novel, Feinberg explores the life of Jess Goldberg, a butch lesbian trying to make a way through the world in a body few people are interested in understanding. In addition to tackling sexuality and gender identity, this novel also reveals hard truths about working class America at the mid-century.

37 / 80

Alice Walker manages to take on the very political issue of female genital mutilation while never losing sight of the power of fierce, deeply engaged storytelling.

38 / 80

A young man grapples with his mother’s rape in a most unexpected, powerful and haunting coming of age story.

39 / 80

Read Wharton for her wicked social commentary wrapped in a torrid but well-mannered story of forbidden love.

40 / 80

There are few novels more sensuous and troubling and magnetic than The Lover. Duras is simply exquisite from the first word to the last. She imbues her prose with the damp heat of Indochina and the fraught tension of forbidden love and never forgets how beautiful words can be when arranged just so.

41 / 80

An observation: People don’t seem to merely read Elena Ferrante’s novels. They devour them in all-night binges, coming to work bleary-eyed and strung out. What’s her secret? Is it that propulsive voice? The way she brings up thoughts you’d never dared to name – about friendships, sex, class? To read them is to remember that the best books are a little harrowing. Start with the Neapolitan Novels. They go down like a warm drink of crystal meth.

42 / 80

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was a Sicilian prince who died in 1957, leaving behind an unpublished novel – the only one he ever wrote. It’s a masterpiece. Set during the unification of Italy, it’s about one of the Prince’s forebears, a wry nobleman who struggles to keeps his household afloat while a new order rises. The book’s most famous line is spoken by the Prince’s savvy, gold-digging nephew, Tancredi: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” In this age of “disruption,” as the revolutions keep coming, it seems even more apt.

43 / 80

Like the whale itself, this book’s sheer size is scary. But crack open the first chapter and you may be surprised by how fun it is to listen to the warm, chatty voice of Melville’s narrator, Ishmael – and how fascinating it is to spend time in the lost world of Pequod, with its colourful crew: Starbucks, Flask, and, of course, the tattooed harpooner Queequeg, whom Melville describes as “George Washington cannibalistically developed.” Yes, it’s an epic about man’s struggle with God and fate, but it’s also a bawdy, deranged adventure with a group of nineteenth-century sailors.

44 / 80

Moby Dick it ain’t, but don’t go through life without reading Heartburn. To the list of great narrators we have to add Rachel Samstat, Ephron’s wisecracking cookbook author, who is seven months pregnant when her husband informs her that he’s in love with another woman. Lemons become lemon soufflé.

45 / 80

Miss Jean Brodie, of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, has some unorthodox teaching methods. Putting aside the official curriculum, she tutors a hand-picked group of students on important topics like her love life, the fact that she is in her “prime” (whatever that means), Renaissance painting, and the finer points of Fascism. Spark assumes a God-like voice, occasionally fast-forwarding to the girls’ futures: fiery deaths, disappointing marriages, etc. As you laugh at Miss Brodie’s outrageous dictums, the petty intrigues of the faculty, and the students’ adolescent excesses, you may be surprised to notice a lump forming in your throat. How can a book so savagely funny be so wrenchingly, heartbreakingly sad?

46 / 80

Has there ever been a more wonderful heroine than Elizabeth “Lizzy” Bennett? Witty yet sensible, fiercely principled yet vulnerable and kind. An independent thinker determined to marry for love.

47 / 80

Twenty-five years before Marilynne Robinson won a Pulitzer Prize for Gilead (and acquired a superfan named Barack Obama), she wrote this short, strange novel about two orphaned sisters being raised by a “drifter” aunt in a forgotten town called Fingerbone. A hypnotic meditation on the transience of life and love, it rings in your ears. We’re all drifters.

48 / 80

The publication of Go Set a Watchman, last year – Mockingbird’s sequel, or is it a rough draft? – sewed confusion about everyone’s favourite high school reading assignment. But it also drew attention to uneasy mixture at the heart of this book. Along with the unforgettable characters – Scout, Boo Radley – it depicts a small-town South where tenderness, humour, and charming eccentricity flourish alongside vicious racism.

49 / 80

A book about an accomplished London family on vacation in the Scottish Hebrides who plan to make a trip to a nearby lighthouse. But it’s by Virginia Woolf, so it’s really about life, consciousness, and the problem of rendering them in art. And the obliterating forces of war, death, and time – and what comes after.

50 / 80

What’s the world’s greatest love story? Most people, pressed to answer this question, would probably not point to a fifty-eight-year-old Roman emperor’s passion for a Greek boy, circa 175 A.D. Certainly not most French women writing in the 1950s. And yet, with The Memoirs of Hadrian, Yourcenar made exactly that case. And more: she collapsed time, showing how a man who lived 2,000 years ago thought and felt just as deeply as we do about big and little subjects, from diet to governance.

51 / 80

Margaret Atwood’s classic of dystopian fiction may be some 30 years old but its depiction of a society driven apart by terrorism and reconstituted as an ultra-conservative Christian theocracy where women have little to no rights at all feels as relevant today as it did when it was published back in 1985, and a sobering reminder that the war on women is as characteristic of the future as the past and present.

52 / 80

This book was a bestseller for a reason. One of the most brutal, elegant, and yes, funniest memoirs of the late 20th century, Mary Karr’s The Liars Club is an important work that is at turns personal and political, the story of a Texas childhood marked by anguish, adventure, and a potent combination of toxic masculinity, alcoholism and thwarted artistic ambitions.

53 / 80

This 1977 masterpiece is possibly the most powerful and moving contemporary meditation on family, grace, masculinity, and humiliations of American history.

54 / 80

The Civil Rights Movement was much more than just boycotts of buses and lunch counters and confrontations with white supremacists. The first in Taylor Branch’s 3 volumes on the life and work of Martin Luther King, the 1,000+ page Parting the Waters marries the seriousness of scholarship with the power of great storytelling to tell the tale of a group of principled and courageous men and women.

55 / 80

Past becomes present in E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 work of historical fiction set in and around the corridors of power, corruption and domestic politics in early 20th century New York City.

56 / 80

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” begins this 1979 collection of Joan Didion essays. Though less-celebrated than 1968’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album harnesses Didion’s skill at capturing the tensions and obessions of mid-to-late 20th century California and amps up the existential ennui another notch as she tries to make sense of the chaos of everything from politics to contemporary consumer culture. “The centre cannot hold,” Didion wrote, quoting Yeats, in “Bethlehem.” In “Album,” the essayist and critic chronicles what life felt like after the centre fell apart.

57 / 80

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 classic is less book than short story but it remains a devastating must-read, not least for the way in which it outlines the spiritual, artistic, economic, emotional, political and physical restraints imposed on women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And also for the manner in which it depicts the ways in which mental illness so often goes hand in hand with lack of liberty.

58 / 80

Austen’s best book, and like so many of her others, an exploration of gender politics and female independence at a time in which the freedoms of women were intimately, and often tragically, constrained by the ways in which they depended on males for economic assistance and security. Sounds like sad stuff, but Austen, as always, approaches these and other issues with an acute sensitivity and ear for comedy that elevates an explication of the frustrating social and economic constraints of one half of the population to a work of art.

59 / 80

One of the finest works of American history published in the 21st century, Isabel Wilkerson’s 600+ page book chronicles the massive migration of African-Americans out of the American south and into the Northeast, Midwest and Western states over the course of about six decades of the 20th century.

60 / 80

Children’s books are not just for children, and this, the greatest chapter book about a young girl ever written, anticipates and reflects second wave feminism with its loving depiction of a loud, opinionated, curious, tomboy living on New York’s Upper East Side who rejects the performance of femininity in favour of an authentic – and, admittedly, sometimes off-putting-self.

61 / 80

It’s already the stuff of legend: A rock star’s uniquely lyrical first book of prose that went on to win the National Book Award for its honest and moving depiction of youth and friendship and its remarkable illustration of New York in the sixties and seventies. If you haven’t already read Just Kids, why the heck not?

62 / 80

It has obvious flaws and must be considered in context by the modern reader we shouldn’t entirely dismiss the novel that helped fuel the Civil War by making the political personal.

63 / 80

Part Bildungsroman, part Gothic horror story, featuring then-radical opinions on religion, social class, and gender, Jane Eyre revolutionized the novel. Plus, the struggle to strike a balance between love and freedom never gets old.

64 / 80

Put aside the historical, social, and political issues surrounding this novel and how the novel has contributed to countless literary traditions – the real reason everyone should read Their Eyes Were Watching God is that it’s a damn good book.

65 / 80

The stories in this stellar collection document China’s turbulent history and transformation from a Marxist dictatorship into one of the world’s fastest growing economies using beautiful, pared-down prose and characters you won’t soon forget.

66 / 80

Nobody writes about the abhorrent things men and women do to each other, about sex, addiction, and masochism—without ever moralizing—better than Gaitskill. It started with this debut short-story collection and has continued in all her work thereafter.

67 / 80

This semi-autobiographical first novel is about family violence and incest; it’s understandably intense and surprisingly funny.

68 / 80

The go-to McCullers is usually The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but Ballad depicts the irrational nature of love and an ill-fated love triangle. Also: it's quite possibly the best-titled novella of all time.

69 / 80

In a word: Jo-Effing-March. She's the ideal early blueprint for strong, willful young women who will likely turn out to be writers.

70 / 80

Before The Group, before Valley of the Dolls, and way before Sex and the City, there was this iconic novel about ambitious women in New York City.

71 / 80

In this one collection, I found the rhyme and reason for why I choose to write in this genre. "The Fourth State of Matter," just one of these essays, is utterly life-changing.

72 / 80

You’ve never read a memoir quite like this. Yuknavitch’s prose is stunning and vibrant, even as she tackles tough moments, and the uglier facts of life.

73 / 80

Even though it's been adapted into a hit Broadway musical, you want to read the story of Bechdel's childhood in book form first.

74 / 80

The renowned story of convention in direct opposition to independence, friendship, and what women are routinely asked to carry in their bodies and on their backs.

75 / 80

This is a necessary read. If you've never read The Colour Purple, you're missing out on some of the greatest literature of our time, not to mention a uniquely black look at poverty, beauty, and what we mean when we say "sister."

76 / 80

This novel is brutal in its telling, and forces empathy and understanding for those who have experienced trauma, especially women. This isn't another sad story. It makes every emotion you already experience a little more real.

77 / 80

Reading Mock's book is like taking her hand and allowing her to guide you into a world where you have intimate access to her pain, brilliance, and enduring courage to live a full life of authenticity as a Trans woman of colour.

78 / 80

This gorgeous novel provides a gracious look into the not-so-distant past, and gives us a full view into life, love, and secrets that ultimately define our lives.

79 / 80

The existence of a young adult novel with an afro-latina teen girl for a protagonist is already reason to cheer, but when you add the fantastical elements from author Older's imagination, you have a masterpiece that defies the status quo in surprising and pioneering ways.

80 / 80

Say what you want about literature meant for children, but the way this book deals with girlhood, womanhood, and grief is more nuanced than most books meant for adults. If you allow it to blow your mind, it will.